The original article is behind a paywall at 404media.
In a pitch deck to prospective customers, one of Facebook’s alleged marketing partners explained how it listens to users’ smartphone microphones and advertises to them accordingly.
As 404 Media reports based on documents leaked to its reporters, the TV and radio news giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims that its so-called “Active Listening” software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to “capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations.”
“Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers,” the deck continues.
In the same slideshow, CMG counted Facebook, Google, and Amazon as clients of its “Active Listening” service. After 404 reached out to Google about its partnership, the tech giant removed the media group from the site for its “Partners Program,” which prompted Meta, the owner of Facebook, to admit that it is reviewing CMG to see if it violates any of its terms of service.
An Amazon spokesperson, meanwhile, told 404 that its Ads arm "has never worked with CMG on this program and has no plans to do so. The spox added, confusingly, that if one of its marketing partners violates its rules, the company will take action.
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Or how about not assuming either way and waiting for proof before believing narratives. Anything else occupies the same space as conspiracy theories.
The math on anyone always listening to everyone’s phones doesn’t add up and will not any time in the near future.
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We literally have wireshark and similar utilities available to all of us to inspect every packet of data coming in to and leaving our phones. You can install pcapdroid right now to see exactly what facebook is doing and where that data is going. This is not complicated stuff.
Now imagine the payday and notoriety that’ll go to the security research firm that is doing this kind of work on a regular basis and is able to definitively prove it’s happening. Why do you think that hasn’t happened yet?
I believed they maybe weren’t listening because those cases that people claim as “proof” of listening can usually be explained in other ways as well. People tend to assume they were listening because its the easier explanation but with the amount of data that Meta has, they can easily lead people into thinking about things by showing specific posts on the Facebook timeline and also predict to some extent what people may end up talking about based on things like how many times you replay a certain video and how long did you keep certain posts in focus on the screen and that sort of stuff that people often don’t realize is also data for them.
Still, I would never put my hand on fire for them and never completely discarded the possibility of them listening.